Justice department warns Elon Musk’s Pac against paying people to vote – report
The justice department has warned Elon Musk’s Pac that paying people to register to vote violates federal law, CNN reports.
The billionaire behind electric car manufacturer Tesla and social media network X has stepped up his support for Donald Trump in recent months, after endorsing him following his near-assassination at a Pennsylvania rally in July. Over the weekend, he said that his America Pac would give $1m every day to a signatory of a petition that appears to be a ploy to battleground state Republicans to register to vote.
Prominent Democrats, including Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, said law enforcement should investigate, which appears to have happened. Here’s what CNN reported:
The Justice Department warned Elon Musk’s America PAC in recent days that his $1 million sweepstakes to registered voters in swing states may violate federal law, people briefed on the matter told CNN.
Musk, who has thrown his support behind former President Donald Trump and is spending millions of dollars supporting his candidacy, has publicized the $1 million prize by his political action committee aiming to increase voter registrations in hotly contested states.
Musk’s initial promise to pay prizes to registered voters immediately raised concerns from election law experts and some state officials who questioned whether it ran afoul of the law.
Federal law bars paying people to register to vote. The language of the petition currently promises $1 million prizes to people chosen at random for signing a petition in support of First and Second Amendment freedoms. But to sign the petition, you must be registered to vote in specific states.
A letter from the Justice Department’s public integrity section, which investigates potential election-related law violations, went to Musk’s political action committee, according to people briefed on the matter.
Key events
A new report from Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center details steps that Chinese operatives have taken to discredit Republican congressmembers and that Russian agents are taking to undermine the Harris-Walz campaign.
Microsoft found a series of videos and social media posts targeting Rep. Barry Moore of Alabama, Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida – three of the most vocal Repubilcan critics of China. “While not always resulting in high levels of engagement, these efforts demonstrate China’s sustained attempts influence U.S. politics across the board,” Clint Watts, who heads the Threat Analysis Center, wrote in a post accompanying the report.
Meanwhile, Microsoft also found that Russian actors had continued creating AI-enhanced deepfake videos about Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz. “While most of these videos received minimal engagement, they underscore Russia’s ongoing use of both traditional and AI-generated content to influence U.S. audiences and stoke political discord,” Watts added. “We have also seen some actors shifting their content publishing strategy from Telegram to X to reach U.S. audiences.”
The news came the same day that the Washington Post reported that a former Florida sheriff is aiding the Kremlin in its efforts to spread misinformation and deepfakes about Harris.
Kamala Harris to deliver ‘closing argument’ at site of January 6 rally
Kamala Harris will deliver a major “closing argument” address next week in the same location that Donald Trump rallied January 6 rioters before they stormed the US Capitol in 2021. According to a senior campaign official, Harris will speak at the Ellipse, a public park just south of the White House, on 29 October – exactly one week before the 5 November election.
The vice-president is expected to emphasize her New Way Forward campaign, and call on voters to move past the chaos and division of the Trump era. The campaign’s decision to hold a “closing argument” address harkens back to Harris’s history as a prosecutor – who is now taking her case to the “jury”, or American voters.
Following news that the owner of the Los Angeles Times had prohibited the paper from endorsing a presidential candidate, the editorials editor resigned today. The editorial board had planned to endorse Kamala Harris.
“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent,” Mariel Garza told the Columbia Journalism Review. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”
The paper’s owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, told the editorial board that the paper would not endorse a candidate on October 11. By then, Garza had already drafted a proposed editorial endorsing Harris on behalf of the board.
My friend Mariel Garza just resigned as editorials editor of @latimes after the newspaper’s owner blocked the editorial board’s plan to endorse Kamala Harris for president. https://t.co/etvsPubDMV
— Sewell Chan (@sewellchan) October 23, 2024
Richard Luscombe in Fort Lauderdale
Supporters of Kamala Harris are gathering at a rally in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Hallandale Beach, Florida, for an early evening speech by her husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff. It’s a rare foray into the Sunshine state by a principal in her campaign.
Harris trails Trump by about six points in a state he won in both 2016 and 2020, and Democrats privately concede the Republican is in line for its 30 electoral college votes this time too. Much of Emhoff’s time in recent days has been spent in more competitive states such as Wisconsin, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
But the US Senate race between incumbent the Republican Rick Scott and her Democratic challenger Debbie Mucarsel-Powell is a closer affair, with Scott leading by about three points. Emhoff is expected to address Florida’s draconian six-week abortion ban, the overturning of which in a ballot initiative called amendment 4 has become a central plank of her campaign.
Mucarsel-Powell is among this evening’s speakers. Emhoff will follow his appearance here with a fundraising event and rally in Coral Gables, Florida, tonight before returning to stump for the vice-president in the battleground states.
With election day less than two weeks away, a top House Democrat is warning that Donald Trump has failed to engage with customary presidential transition procedures. Representative Jamie Raskin, the leading Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, sent a letter to Donald Trump and JD Vance today warning that the two are “breaking the precedent set by every other presidential candidate since 2010” by not signing the memorandum of understanding that typically governs the transition of power. The memorandum of understanding triggers government transition funding and planning assistance, which allows nominees to access office space and equipment, information technology and staff assistance.
In the letter, Raskin wrote that Trump’s refusal to sign the documents “may be at least partially driven by your intent to circumvent fundraising rules that put limits on private contributions on the transition effort and require public reporting. You may also be acting out of a more general aversion to ethics rules designed to prevent conflicts of interest in the incoming administration.”
In a press release, the House Oversight Committee added that Trump’s failure to sign the documents “is particularly troubling in light of the fact that he has repeatedly refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power”.
Police have arrested two men for fomenting election-related violence in Colorado and Arizona. Last night, Tempe police arrested Jeffrey Michael Kelly for allegedly shooting at Democratic party offices in Tempe, Arizona, in September and October. Meanwhile, a Colorado man named Teak Ty Brockbank pleaded guilty today to transmitting interstate threats, for making online threats about killing elected officials in Colorado and Arizona.
Kelly was charged with seven felony counts and three misdemeanor counts, including terrorism and unlawful discharge, the Arizona Republic reports. Arizona Mirror reporter Jerod MacDonald-Evoy adds that police found 120 guns and 250,000 rounds of ammunition in Kelly’s home.
Just in:
The man who Tempe Police arrested for shooting at the DNC Office in Tempe and for placing anti-Democrat signs with white powder was found to have 120 guns (some loaded), 250,000 rounds of ammo, body armor and a grenade launcher at his house. Story later today. pic.twitter.com/EIZhsS3xSw
— Jerod MacDonald-Evoy (@JerodMacEvoy) October 23, 2024
Charges against Brockbank, meanwhile, were brought by the justice department’s Election Threats Task Force over threats Brockbank made in 2021 and 2022, including calling for elections officials to be hanged. Brockbank will be sentenced in February.
Kamala Harris has told NBC News that she’s preparing for the possibility that Donald Trump will declare victory before the election is complete.
“We will deal with election night and the days after as they come, and we have the resources and the expertise and the focus on that,” she said.
Vice President Harris tells @NBCNews she’s preparing for the possibility that Trump declares victory before votes are counted next month.
“We will deal with election night and the days after as they come, and we have the resources and the expertise and the focus on that.”
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 23, 2024
Speaking at a Believers and Ballots town hall in Zebulon, Georgia, today, Donald Trump praised tech mogul Elon Musk for providing hurricane relief where he says the federal government did not. The former president has returned to his scapegoating of immigrants, saying that the federal government would have more funds for hurricane relief if it were not supporting non-citizens.
“You know who did help us though? Elon Musk,” he said. After Hurricane Helene hit, he said: “They needed Starlink badly in North Carolina.” Trump added that Musk “saved a lot of lives”.
False information has swirled in the communications blackout that followed Hurricane Helene’s devastation. Phone and power lines were down across the south, the Guardian’s Blake Montgomery reports.
Musk has a history of inserting himself into rescue operations. He accused the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) of blocking his satellite internet company, Starlink, from delivering to parts of North Carolina decimated by the hurricane, a claim both Fema and transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg said was false.
The justice department has warned Elon Musk’s America Pac, which has donated millions of dollars to support Trump’s bid for the presidency, that paying people to register to vote violates federal law, CNN reports.
Unions have vexed Democrats lately, with the Teamsters notably declining to endorse a candidate in the presidential election, after supporting Joe Biden in 2020. But the Guardian’s Michael Sainato reports that swing state members of the United Auto Workers, another important union, are on board with Harris’s candidacy:
United Auto Workers (UAW) members in the battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada support the presidential candidate Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by 22 points, according to a poll conducted by the union.
UAW members in Michigan – the center of the US auto industry – support Harris over Trump by 20 percentage points, with 54% supporting Harris over 34% supporting Trump, the poll found. The union claimed in 2020 that UAW members accounted for 84% of Joe Biden’s margin of victory in Michigan.
The poll also found that support among non-college-educated men – a key demographic where Harris has been lagging – gave Harris a 14-point margin over Trump.
Both Trump and Harris have courted the UAW’s members. The UAW president, Shawn Fain, has backed Harris and become a target of Trump’s ire. Biden supported the UAW in its strike against the US’s big three auto companies last year, becoming the first president to walk a picket line.
Justice department warns Elon Musk’s Pac against paying people to vote – report
The justice department has warned Elon Musk’s Pac that paying people to register to vote violates federal law, CNN reports.
The billionaire behind electric car manufacturer Tesla and social media network X has stepped up his support for Donald Trump in recent months, after endorsing him following his near-assassination at a Pennsylvania rally in July. Over the weekend, he said that his America Pac would give $1m every day to a signatory of a petition that appears to be a ploy to battleground state Republicans to register to vote.
Prominent Democrats, including Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, said law enforcement should investigate, which appears to have happened. Here’s what CNN reported:
The Justice Department warned Elon Musk’s America PAC in recent days that his $1 million sweepstakes to registered voters in swing states may violate federal law, people briefed on the matter told CNN.
Musk, who has thrown his support behind former President Donald Trump and is spending millions of dollars supporting his candidacy, has publicized the $1 million prize by his political action committee aiming to increase voter registrations in hotly contested states.
Musk’s initial promise to pay prizes to registered voters immediately raised concerns from election law experts and some state officials who questioned whether it ran afoul of the law.
Federal law bars paying people to register to vote. The language of the petition currently promises $1 million prizes to people chosen at random for signing a petition in support of First and Second Amendment freedoms. But to sign the petition, you must be registered to vote in specific states.
A letter from the Justice Department’s public integrity section, which investigates potential election-related law violations, went to Musk’s political action committee, according to people briefed on the matter.
Trump campaign accuses Harris of fomenting violence, peddling ‘outright lies and falsehoods’
Donald Trump’s campaign has released a furious statement attacking Kamala Harris, saying the vice-president is “LYING and LOSING” and accusing her of spreading falsehoods that fueled the two assassination attempts against the former president.
It comes after the vice-president warned earlier today that Trump was seeking “unchecked power” in his campaign for another four years in the White House. Here’s what Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung had to say:
Kamala Harris is a stone-cold loser who is increasingly desperate because she is flailing, and her campaign is in shambles. That is why she continues to peddle outright lies and falsehoods that are easily disproven. The fact is that Kamala’s dangerous rhetoric is directly to blame for the multiple assassination attempts against President Trump and she continues to stoke the flames of violence all in the name of politics. She is despicable and her grotesque behavior proves she is wholly unfit for office.
Trump may respond personally to Harris in a few minutes, when he begins his Believers and Ballots Faith Town Hall in Zebulon, Georgia.
Does Biden agree Trump is a fascist? ‘Yes,’ his spokesperson says
At her briefing today, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Joe Biden agreed with those who say Donald Trump is a fascist.
“I mean, yes,” Jean-Pierre replied, when a reporter put the question to her in the White House briefing room. She went on to argue that Trump himself has made no secret of how he would like to govern:
The former president has said he is going to be a dictator on day one. We cannot ignore that … we cannot ignore or forget what happened on January 6, 2021.
Jason Rodrigues
While the debate around UK Labour party staff volunteering to go to the United States to help campaign for the Democratic party continues, in London some expat Americans are out in the streets of English capital tonight, asking passerbys if they are American, and if they have voted yet.
The dozen-strong group, some wearing T-shirts saying “Democrats abroad for Harris, Walz,” explained to me why they are so keen to reach out to their fellow compatriots in the UK, telling me that in such a tight contest for the US presidency, “Every vote counts.”
With polls suggesting that the race for the presidency is pretty much neck and neck, they could well be right.
Joan E Greve
Bob Casey campaign’s new attack ad against Republican Dave McCormick comes as the Pennsylvania Senate race has grown increasingly competitive in its final days, further complicating Democrats’ path to maintaining their majority in the upper chamber.
While Casey had previously been favored to win re-election, the Cook Political Report recently moved his race from “lean Democrat” to “toss up”. According to the Hill/Decision Desk HQ’s polling average, Casey’s lead now stands at 3 points compared with 10 points in mid-August.
Speaking to the Guardian last month, Casey acknowledged the race would be a tough fight, but he predicted Pennsylvania voters would ultimately send him back to Washington for another six years.
“I think people know they have a stake in this election,” Casey said, adding, “I think it’ll be close – but I think we’re going to win.”
Joan E Greve
Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat of Pennsylvania, has released a new campaign ad attacking his opponent, Republican Dave McCormick, over allegations that McCormick fostered a toxic work environment as CEO of the hedge fund Bridgewater.
The ad highlights claims, outlined in the book The Fund by Rob Copeland, that McCormick attempted to silence and retaliate against female employees who came forward with allegations of sexual harassment.
“Reports made it clear that under Dave McCormick the world’s largest hedge fund is a dangerous place for women to work,” the narrator of the Casey ad says. “They were groped, sexually harassed or worse. But instead of protecting his female employees, McCormick protected his profits.”
The ad specifically cites claims that McCormick told one employee who had been harassed that she would “be in litigation for the rest of her life” if she spoke out. The Fund also recounts numerous complaints of gender pay discrimination among female employees of Bridgewater.
The Casey ad concludes: “That’s ugly. That’s Dave McCormick.”
Former national security adviser John Bolton has come to former White House chief of staff John Kelly’s defense after the latter said that Donald Trump “prefers the dictator approach to government”.
In an interview with CNN, Bolton, a former Trump ally turned critic, said:
The campaign has attacked John’s credibility. In any comparison of what John Kelly might say versus what Donald Trump might say about a particular event or what these munchkins on the Trump campaign are saying about John Kelly, you can take what John says to the bank. I didn’t hear many, probably most of these statements myself, but if John says that Donald Trump said them, I believe it implicitly.
Bolton added:
Certainly this recitation of what he’s done should be compelling to people not to vote for Trump. Trump … after leaving office, said it publicly, he would suspend the constitution or terminate it because of the unfairness, the effort to steal the 2020 election. That statement alone, if he said nothing else, if he never mentioned the words ‘Adolf Hitler’, that alone is disqualifying, in my point of view.”
Earlier today, the Atlantic reported that Trump allegedly said that he wanted the kind of generals that Adolf Hitler had.
“You can take what John says to the bank,” Amb. John Bolton says regarding the denials and new interviews from Gen. John Kelly. “If John says that Donald Trump said them, then I believe them implicitly.” pic.twitter.com/zLRAxMr5wq
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) October 23, 2024
Donald Trump has furiously accused the UK’s Labour party of interfering in the US election, calling it ‘far left’, after party activists travelled to campaign for his opponent.
The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland and Michael Safi report:
Walz on his early vote: ‘An opportunity to turn the page on the chaos of Donald Trump’
Tim Walz headed to the voting booth on Wednesday in St Paul, Minnesota, to cast his early ballot along with his wife, Gwen, and son, Gus.
After he voted, Walz said:
Beautiful Minnesota day, super exciting. Cast my vote for Kamala Harris, [Democratic senator] Amy Klobuchar, [Democratic representative] Betty McCollum and to have my son with me, Gus, to vote for the first time, exciting. An opportunity to turn the page on the chaos of Donald Trump and a new way forward …
Look, Donald Trump made it very clear that this election is about Donald Trump taking full control of the military to use against his political enemies, taking full control of the Department of Justice to prosecute those who disagree with him, taking full control of the media on what is told and what is told to the American public …
The opportunity here, and the absolute requirement of Americans, is to understand that this rhetoric has not been used in this country, certainly not by a party’s presidential nominee, and the opportunity here is to elect Kamala Harris.
